370. La Jetée (The Pier) (1961)

Directed By Chris Marker

Synopsis

After World War III the victors do experiments on prisoners to send them to the past and future so that humanity may survive.

Review

This is a very short film done completely by making a sequence of stills connected by narration. And this is all you need to make a film, sequential images and a plot on screen.

In fact the film is so well paced that after some 5 minutes you start forgetting its particular style and just follow the story of it. This is experimentalism how it should be done, not as a chore for the viewer but as something that the viewer can enjoy at least as much as its creator. So the visual style is challenging? Put some interesting plot in it. The plot is strange, mundane or cryptic? Do it in a visually interesting way. Sometimes both might work as in Yasujiro Ozu's films where the camera is still and the subject mundane but touching, but that is rare indeed.

So the film works great both as a piece of entertainment (which then would give origin to 12 Monkeys) and as an example of what sequential images on a screen can do even without the "moving" image. Somewhere between the Comic and the Film, this is a unique piece of Cinema.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German. The story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24x36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. Due to its brevity, La jetée is often screened in theatres alongside other films; Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) was the film with which it was first released.

It is online, part 1:

369. L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961)

Directed by Alain Resnais

Synopsis

Two people (A and X) might or might not have had an affair and then might or might not have made a date for the following year. The woman (who may or may not be married to M) may be alive or dead seems to believe or not what the man recollects from their combination. They may or may not end up leaving Marienbad (or is it some place else?) together.


Review

Sometimes films are more interesting than actually entertaining. This is, most definitely, the case here. You might find yourself nodding off throughout the film but it does stay with you afterwards and there are interesting questions posed by it that you will reflect on.

This kind of film serves a strong purpose in the way that it opens doors to use experimental techniques in more "entertainment-centred" films. Marienbad has plenty of things to detest, it is French to the point of ridicule, full of affected artificiality, clichés and unnatural speech. And then it has the good things from it being French, like a certain depth of both acting and concept, and Coco Chanel designing the women's clothes.

In the end it is food for thought, is X the writer of the film endlessly changing the story? Is A dead? Are both X and A dead and is M imagining the whole thing? In the end it is all fruitless because it means nothing. But an interesting and very pretty nothing.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. The dream-like nature of the film has fascinated and baffled audiences and critics, some hailing it as a masterpiece, others finding it to be incomprehensible. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the chateau and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows, the trees in the garden do not.

Online, first part:

368. Spelndor in the Grass (1961)

Directed By Elia Kazan

Synopsis

Sexual repression is not good for you. Nice girls get no cock and go insane because nice boys go to bad girls to get their jollies. Bad girls get no respect and get cock for the wrong reasons. A no win situation here. But true love can be found in the psychiatric hospital.

Review

How can Elia Kazan, who was essentially a shitty person, direct great films? Well the same can be asked of Woody Allen or D. W. Griffith, or in musical terms Wagner for that matter. We have to be able to separate the work from the man. And Elia Kazan is again masterful in his direction.

Clearly influenced by the new stuff coming out of Europe he applies it to a traditionally American melodrama to great effect. At least he gets the best performance out of Natalie Wood I had seen.

The themes explored here show the shift in the early 1960s to tell the production code to take a hike. Exploring education, sexuality, morals and gender in a way that is more honest than much we have seen until now it manages to transcend the melodrama genre to be a quite powerful film. This is due to his reliance on method acting and some pretty great control of filming techniques which were only now becoming common, making the film feel modern even when some of the opinions expressed in it aren't.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film's title is taken from a line of William Wordsworth's poem "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood":

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind...

Film is Online, Part 1:

367. Spartacus (1960)

Directed By Stanley Kubrick (and a little bit by Anthony Mann)

Synopsis

Spartacus is a slave trained as a gladiator, gets other slaves to get uppity in some kind of commie red revolt. It all goes to shit.

Review

This is probably the last of the truly great classical sword and sandal epics. They would be resurrected later by stuff like Gladiator but this is the last great one. And to my opinion it is definitely the best of them all.

The heavy handed religious rhetoric so present in Ben-Hur or Ten Commandments is really absent here, replaced by much smarter and therefore more effective symbolism. It isn't pure coincidence that Spartacus dies on the cross, he brings a message of hope through armed revolution, he is a true hero of the people.

If the American right had any interpretative power they'd be up in arms due to the messianic parallelisms made with an essentially good but violent man, which made me cry with his death on the cross... something no film on Christ ever did. A moving, deep and beautiful film. The best classical epic, but so close to not being one, with short battle scenes, focus on character's emotions, that it really signals the death of the whole genre for a time to come. Oh and Peter Ustinov is amazing throughout.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film was re-released in 1967 (in a version 23 minutes shorter than the original release), and again in 1991 with the same 23 minutes restored by Robert A. Harris, plus an additional 14 minutes that had been cut from the film before its original release. This addition includes several violent battle sequences as well as a bath scene in which the Roman patrician and general Crassus (Olivier) attempts to seduce his slave Antoninus (Curtis) using the analogy of "eating oysters" and "eating snails" to express his opinion that sexual preference is a matter of taste rather than morality.

I'm Spartacus: